Free Throw Like A Girl by Jean Thompson Page B

any other, you put your head down and do it. I wish you could send me some sexy pictures of you but I guess not. Tell Tara Daddy misses her lots, you too.
    xxxxx Jack
    Kelly’s father, who had been a Marine, said that even the Army—he always made clear he held it in low regard—would be good for Jack. The service would make a man out of him. It toughened you up and taught you discipline. The bond you made with the men you served with was a blood bond that would last a lifetime. Kelly Ann thought about Pete Peterson and wondered if she was in for a bonded lifetime of him.
    She heard something wistful in her father’s words, and in the spaces between the words. It was the same for the men down at the VFW. Whatever they’d done in the service, they’d polished it up like a medal. It had been the best part of them, their real and secret life. It was a brotherhood of secrets. And when he came home, Jack would be in on it.
    One morning she left the baby downstairs with Jack’s mother-—Tara had her own crib there by now—and drove to the next county to see Jack’s recruiting sergeant. It was summer again, with a red-winged blackbird shrilling from every fence post, and big cotton clouds in a hot blue sky. This time last year, the Army hadn’t yet turned into anything personal.
    The recruiting office was in a little mall next to a larger mall. There was a manicure place and a phone store and a Chinese take-out and then the recruiter’s, like it was just one more thing to buy. Kelly Ann parked and walked in the front door. No one was visible in the front section of the office, which was just a couple of desks with chairs. A movable partition screened off the rest of it, the coffee room and the room where they showed movies of Army life. Posters illustrated different kinds of military missions: the grubby camaraderie of the unit gathered around a tank, the helicopter pilot with his hands steady on the controls, the honor guard standing at attention. In all this there were two women soldiers and three black ones, a proportion that Kelly Ann guessed had something to do with who the Army wanted to attract and who they didn’t want to scare away.
    She waited, and after a minute Sergeant Crissy came out from behind the partition. “Hi, can I help you?”
    She’d been there any number of times, sat there with Jack while he and the sergeant went over all the things the Army would require of him and all the things the Army would shower on him in return. Kelly Ann spoke her name, and Jack’s, and watched the sergeant’s face register her. “Well sure,” Sergeant Crissy said. “If you’d have come in with Jack, I would have known you in a minute. What do you hear from him, everything going good?”
    He told her to sit down and he asked about the baby too. The sergeant was tall and well put together. Here in the office he wore green fatigues and combat boots, but when he’d come to the high school he’d worn a dress blue uniform and his service medals. He was the cleanest man any of them had ever seen, clean down to his shoelaces, polished up to his buttons, and all that powerful barbering. They’d all fallen a little bit in love with him on the spot, boys as well as girls.
    When they’d finished the small talk, Sergeant Crissy said, “So what brings you down here? Anything I can help you with, anything at all?” The military was one big family, she’d been told, and while she didn’t much believe it, she didn’t mind making him go through the drill.
    â€œI need some information. About enlisting.”
    He didn’t get it at first, and even when he did he pretended she was joking. “Now why would you want to go and do that?”
    â€œSame reasons as anybody else.”
    â€œYou’re thinking of enlisting.”
    â€œThat’s what I’m saying.”
    â€œWell that’s something.” He was